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First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

popularmechanics.com

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Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#41

Post by crusso »

igravious wrote: post #6
teddyh wrote: post #2

This gives us four possibilities: 1. This geared creature must be considered part mechanical. A cyborg, if you will. 2. A "gear" is no longer (and was never) a "mechanical" device, but instead an organic one. Using gears is no longer (and was maybe never) doing mechanics. 3. Whether something is mechanical or organic depends on the process which created it. This is the "colored bits" or "patent" view. (If I build som…

5. All dichotomies are false dichotomies. 6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.

6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.

Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics.

Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful one for achieving the goal of survival through jumping very far, very quickly.

Evolution has yielded some astoundingly more impressive structures. Take a look at this video that explains your own muscle contractions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M

The fact that our brains can pattern match the semblance of gears in the issid with gears that we created is a much more impressive development than the gears of the issid themselves.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#42

Post by kriro »

Maybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators.

Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#44

Post by theon144 »

benologist wrote: post #26
lifeformed wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Ghostery, it killed it somehow. Not sure if it's the site's fault or Ghostery's?

Ghostery adds some weird play button you have to click to view the article, not sure what that is but it's new and annoying.

It's not.

The button is there to temporarily (or not) enable a tracker, when it's necessary for function - apparently, Ghostery decided the text is behind a tracker. It's strange though, I'm using Ghostery too (latest version), nothing enabled, and I didn't get the play button.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#45

Post by ocharles »

mrb wrote: post #43

Why do they say the gears "look nothing like what you'd find in your car"? They look very similar to me.

To me it appears that there are teeth on one "side" of the gear, but on the back of it is a flat surface. The valley between the teeth is sloped from front to back, going from a deep valley to no valley at all. At least, that was what I took from that picture.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#47

Post by maxerickson »

EvanKelly wrote: post #13
brianpgordon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creatures with cool adaptations strengthen my faith in evolution. It's creatures like the panda or the koala or the sloth that shake my faith in evolution.

The sloth's evolutionary advantage is that they are so fucking cool.

Did you do that on purpose?

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#49

Post by nether »

bcgraham wrote: post #27
mikeash wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. The concepts of "organic" and "mechanical" are purely human inventions used to conveniently categorize the world, and there is no reason the world has to obey our desire to fit neatly into categories we devise. Any discussion of the meaning of "mechanical" and "organic" is a discussion of language, not of anything outside humanity.

Isn't this the same as #4?

Top comment is pretty much, "this changes my whole theory of nonsense which I just invented." It's a pseudoscientific strawman and I can't believe it was upvoted. As a mechanical engineer I see tons of mechanical components in the human body. Diaphragm pumps, ball and socket joints, pinned joints, tensile supports. None of this makes you a cyborg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#50

Post by astrodust »

wslh wrote: post #18
john_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four. A gear is just a piece of geometry that happens to be useful for a number of practical purposes. Same with rods, rings, and so on. People apply labels to it according to how they perceive it.

And what's the limit for such innovation? can microprocessors be developed naturally?

The natural processes that drive this sort of "innovation" never work as cleanly as we do when being intelligent about such things. There are elements of "microprocessor-like" components in creatures, things that will do AND, OR, NAND and NOR type logic computation through neurons, but they're not packaged into an integrated circuit.

If there was evolutionary pressure to produce an integrated circuit, some form of one would undoubtedly evolve eventually.

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